What's new in Scia Engineer 2009 - The X release

What are the most important characteristics of a first class structural software platform? It is summarized in three words:

Quality - Performance - Openness

With version 2009 of Scia Engineer we decided to build on the experience of our customers and come up with numerous improvements resulting in a significant increase of the performance. What exactly is changed in this new release? Read this edition of “What’s New” to find out the answer. The X release...

Most of us are in search of the X factor; the X stands for the ultimate eXperience, the search for talent. It has a mythical meaning, it is the assembly of “charisma” and “sex appeal” in the metaphorical sense... Today, Nemetschek Scia is proud to present you the X release of Scia Engineer. The X factor has three themes...

Quality - Performance - Openness

In version 2009 of Scia Engineer we are coming up with numerous smaller improvements resulting in an increase of the overall performance. On the one hand, these improvements reflect the suggestions, remarks and requirements of our clients. On the other, they stem from our own professional experience.

Performance

Better memory management, one of the key X-factors in 2009, means namely the reduction in usage of computer resources, which in turn speeds up the computer response during modelling, design and optimisation of the structures. We have also optimised the Drawing Engine in Scia Engineer and got faster redrawing of the structure including additional model data such as loads, supports, etc. All this opens doors to the effective usage of Scia Engineer for analysis of larger-than-ever models.
More and more computers are equipped with 64-bit processors. For this reason, the new solver in Scia Engineer has been developed for both 32-bit and 64-bit computing. In addition, the solver is able to use all available processors in the PC hardware. Both these refinements produce faster calculation, which is noticeable mainly for big projects (with several thousands of equations).
Furthermore, huge structures can be calculated using the direct solver instead of the iterative one, which again results in reduction of the calculation time.